At the top of 2018, Hayley Kiyoko dubbed the year #20GAYTEEN. It was, she suggested, the year that LGBTQ musicians and their art would be thrust into the mainstream. “It’s our year, it’s our time,” she wrote on Twitter. “To thrive and let our souls feel alive.”

She wasn’t wrong. In music, the past year has seen a refreshing onslaught of artists expressing themselves and their identities explicitly and openly. Kiyoko herself released her debut album, Expectations, a confrontational and candid record on which she sang about sex with women and mental health, cementing her status as “the lesbian Jesus.”

The queer specificity of Kiyoko’s music manifested itself in a number of other albums this year, too. On Bloom, Troye Sivan explored his experiences as a gay man venturing into the world underage and looking for connection, the joys of bottoming, and what happiness looks like a queer adult. Likewise, British group Years & Years, fronted by Olly Alexander, released music drenched in same-sex desire, including “Sanctify,” a song about straight men who have sex with other men.

There were also massive albums from Janelle Monaé, whose Grammy-nominated record Dirty Computer explored the specifics of life as a queer, black woman; newcomer Rina Sawayama opened up about her pansexuality on her bop “Cherry”; Brockhampton redefined what constitutes a boy band while also queering hip hop; SOPHIE and Teddy Geiger became the first openly trans women to be nominated for Grammys; and British multi-talent MNEK released an album about his experiences as a gay black man.

All of this LGBTQ visibility put queer representation at a new cultural peak. That can only be taken as a win. Nevertheless, the sweet feeling of victory is tinged with the sour truth of it all: queerness still, it seems, isn’t bankable.

Looking at the numbers, things get rough. Sivan’s Bloom debuted at Number 4 on the Billboard 200 album chart. The following week it dropped 40 places, and nearly another 50 the week after. Brockhampton’s latest record, Iridescence, debuted atop the charts, but the album dropped a whopping 87 places the following week. Kiyoko’s album debuted at Number 12, before dropping to 165 on the chart within seven days. Monaé, the person with the biggest celebrity clout, sold only 54,000 copies of Dirty Computer in its first week, debuting at Number 6 before tumbling down to 32 a week later.

Looking at LGBTQ artists and their performance on the singles chart is even more disheartening. Only a handful of the artists mentioned above have managed to crack the Billboard Hot 100 this year, with only Kiyoko managing to land in the Top 40.

It’s also not limited to just music. While this year’s “Where We Are on TV” GLAAD report revealed that there were more LGBTQ characters on primetime television than ever before, on the silver screen things weren’t so rosy. GLAAD’s Studio Responsibility Index found that LGBTQ representation in major studio movies was down 5.6% from the year before, with only 12% of major studio films (14 out of 109) featuring characters that were LGBTQ.

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Financially, queer cinema hasn’t flourished despite strong marketing pushes and frenzied social media fandoms. The nationwide release of Call Me By Your Name was met with a tepid box office response. Deadline dubbed it an “underperformance.” Following the film’s Oscar nominations, its box office revenues actually dropped 6%. For comparison, Call Me By Your Name made nearly $10 million less than 2016’s Moonlight.

This year’s biggest LGBTQ movie release was Love, Simon, the first major studio-backed gay teen romantic comedy. During the film’s almost ubiquitous promo campaign (including a #spon episode of Riverdale) it felt like this could be the moment that LGBTQ stories truly mainstreamed. But Love, Simon didn’t smash the box office. It wasn’t a flop, but it struggled to keep up momentum, its takings dropping 33% after its first weekend. There are, of course, numerous reasons for this — teen romances notoriously struggle at the box office and there are variables like busy release schedules to consider. But compared to the straight love story The Fault in Our Stars, which made $124.9 million, Love, Simon was a much lower key release.

The Guardian recently wrote that “queer male pop [had] reclaimed its star status,” and that “male queerness is again marketable.” It argued that capitalism would attempt to “curate” queerness, package up the good and leave out the facets deemed undesirable. But surely, films like Love, Simon and Kiyoko's shimmery pop—while essential forms of representation—have already done that? Examine the figures, and the “star status” doesn’t look particularly reclaimed. The investment in and support of LGBTQ narratives, stories, and art by the general public is still lacking.

The ambivalence is worrying. The music and film industries are profit-driven businesses with creative decisions led by their financials. This year's response to LGBTQ art proves that it isn’t as profitable as visibility would have you believe. Without the figures to support it, record labels and movie studios could quickly, quietly stop investing in the creation of commercial LGBTQ content.

Thankfully, in music at least, it’s live shows that dictate the commercial viability of an artist, and things look promising for acts like Smith, Sivan, and Monaé (although Smith is the only artist of the three booking large-scale arenas). With film, it’s harder to figure out how to make up for lackluster numbers. Licensing content to streaming services is one solution; people are more likely to watch something on Netflix than to head to their local movie theater and drop $12 on seeing a film once. But Netflix and Amazon aren’t overflowing with original LGBTQ content, yet. There's hope in 2018 victories like Netflix's Queer Eye reboot. But there's still an entire, empty playing field waiting to be occupied.

There’s also the (bad) argument from cishet people that LGBTQ content isn’t made for them, as if alternative genders and sexuality are a giant chasm that their straightness forbids them from crossing. The only exception to this appears to be RuPaul’s Drag Race, which straight audiences are lapping up on a major U.S. TV network (though there’s surely an element of novelty that attracts them to the show, a curiosity of the “other” driving them there).

A few years ago, marriage equality, the subsequent torrent of LGBTQ media, and the commodification of queer culture by brands created a sense of security, especially among a certain subsection of the gay and lesbian community. It’s what has enabled such strong visibility and movements like #20GAYTEEN. Their importance cannot be downplayed, no matter the financial gains—great queer art was created and celebrated.

However, that security created complacency, both among cisgender heterosexuals and cisgender lesbian, bisexual, gay, and queer people. It meant that certain pieces of the queer community don’t pay the problems facing us any mind because they don’t specifically affect them. They don’t see the ongoing inequalities, the fact that black gay and bisexual men are more affected by HIV than any other group in the United States, and the fact that this year alone at least 26 transgender people have been murdered in the United States. All the while, the sense of security—false or otherwise— has now eroded away so much so that our allies are now just "detached supporters."

LGBTQ art's lack of financial success isn't in any way equal to the death of members of our community. All I'm suggesting is that the general public’s ambivalence to—or outright disinterest in—LGBTQ popular culture is a result of their systemic attitudes and behaviors towards and against us. It’s no wonder that when LGBTQ people express their queerness explicitly, either sexually or with specificity, there’s still a collective shrug (perhaps even a shudder) from a heteronormative society.

It’s why we need to scrutinize narratives that suggest that queerness is somehow mainstream, or ones that propose that there’s no longer any need to fight for representation. Yes, queer musicians thrived in 2018, creating some of the year's best music. But we need more than just a year and a quippy nickname. As Kiyoko stated plainly in her tweet, we need to thrive and let our souls feel alive, but we also need to fight and remember that there’s still a long way to go before queerness and LGBTQ people will ever, really, have star status. We need to take #20GAYTEEN and spread that message indefinitely.

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